Around 2009 I read Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl. Despite being the typical princess-in-medieval-based-fantasy-setting, and despite being a rewrite of an old fairy tale, it felt original and real to me. The settings, the traditions, even an endless pine forest and a goose pasture came alive.

I thought, I want to do that.

The rest of the series, and her Princess Academy series, are like this too. She writes in beautiful language, not stuffy or flowery, but imaginative and evocative and succinct all at once. The "magic" system--while definitely fantastical--is subtle, and actually kind of plausible, like it's just another aspect of the natural world. (And a definite plus, the romance is clean.)

I currently have one book. No magic, but of course I hope it's a magical read. It's written and mostly edited, with the working title Beyond the Mountain. I began writing it about two years ago, around the winter of 2014-15, and it's still in editing and beta-reading now. That's a long time, but I've learned a lot about the writing process and about my personal process, so next time I'll have an idea what I'm doing!

I had the story in my head for a long time, exploring possible directions the plot could take and performing scenes repeatedly in my head for my own entertainment at night instead of going to sleep, until finally I decided I may as well write it down. I used no written outline, and took my time to write well (or so I believed), thinking the editing would therefore be pretty easy.

Turns out, I way overestimated word and scenes requirements. And the writing was bad. Not to mention my world-building evolved quite a bit. The result was: a lot of story to fix, a lot of scenes to cut, and a lot of wordiness to weed.

I doubt prewriting and outlining would have helped me a lot back then. I didn't have a firm enough grasp of story structure. But now, two years later, I have a far better grasp of that, and of all that happens during the writing process, and of all the things I should know about the story from the beginning.

I hope to start a new project soon, but for now it's Beyond the Mountain.